Feature:

Effective DevOps accelerates the design, development and deployment cycle

The marriage between development
and operations is just a few years old, but it's already becoming apparent that just
smashing two words, or worlds, together to create 'DevOps'
has not yet led to the outcome desired. The problems in this relationship aren't just coming from
within. It's actually the pressure from enterprise leaders for DevOps to perform at
superhuman levels that's become too intense. It's like business stakeholders are the parents of the
bride and groom, nagging the new couple about when they can expect grandchildren, only instead of
one new grandkid every few years, these grandparents expect to see a new release for revenue
applications (RevApps) every couple ofweeks.

The speed with which a business can do new things, respond to
competitor threats or attack competitors is tied intrinsically to the speed with which IT can
enhance and deliver new functionality.

David Hurwitz, SVP of Worldwide
Marketing at Serena
Software, indicates this trend is here to stay. "It's not like the IT of old. The speed with
which a business can do new things, respond to competitor threats or attack competitors is tied
intrinsically to the speed with which IT can enhance and deliver new functionality into its revenue
applications."

Even the most massive enterprises in the financial, retail and airline sectors don't need to
ramp up their DevOps speed to the same levels as Amazon
or FaceBook.
However, they do need continuous
development and very frequent deployment. Hurwitz points out that any company can do a
super-fast RevApp project over the weekend. But the chances are high that it will fail and have to
be rolled back. And you can't just bring in the whole team every weekend over and over. You'll burn
out your best people and still end up with sub-par work. The design, development and deployment
cycle needs to be something that occurs as naturally as breathing. It should be business as usual,
not some heroic effort.

Which tools will supercharge DevOps?

Agile
methodology and the availability of cloud
resources have swept away many of the barriers to speedy development and deployment. However,
there are some practical factors still stymieing the true potential of DevOps. These include:

Poor coordination and lack of visibility

The need to rely on others for key tasks

Manual processes that create bottlenecks

In the RevApp world, delays often have the same impact as downtime. So these are not trivial
issues. According to Hurwitz, these problems can be resolved with the right toolset.

First, there's the issue of coordination. A variety of
stakeholders need to know what's really going on at both the overview level and granular level.
A release calendar system that provides this capability is what allows Dev and Ops to really
coordinate as intended instead of being on a collision course. In an ideal environment, no one
should ever have to request a status report. Real time status tracking for every aspect of
the cycle from database updates to O/S patches should be available on-demand rather than by special
request. Better coordination supports dynamic scheduling, automatic alerts, and other best
practices for DevOps. Plus, since the information is all in the system, it creates a natural audit
trail.

Self-service and automation complete the picture

The other key
tool developers need to have at their disposal is self-serve provisioning. It's not enough to
have access to the cloud if developers still need to go through a tedious requisition process and
wait around for someone else to give them the green light. This capability must be available
(within reasonable limits) directly from the developer's console at the click of a button.
Individuals and teams should be able to spin up test environments and other resources as needed to
keep their work flowing.

The final piece of the puzzle is the bridge between Dev and Ops – deployment.
This is where things tend to grind to a halt no matter how much time and manpower you throw at the
problem. As David says, "Manual deployment creates a train wreck of labor. It's expensive from a
labor point of view. But the real killer is how slow and non-Agile it is. It takes calling in the
whole football team to get stuff done." Most organizations just can't afford to do that more than
once every few months. To be fast enough for today's IT, deployment must be truly continuous –
something that happens automatically all the time as part of the development process.

Equipping DevOps to succeed pays off

Enterprises interested in getting the most out of DevOps should consider:

The resources wasted on miscommunication and manual deployment

The missed opportunities to create business value

The loss of actual revenue in many cases

Add all that up, and you are looking at some really fast ROI from a better communication
platform combined with an automated deployment solution. In the end, it's having the right tools
that may save the DevOps "marriage" and produce the RevApps outcomes that make enterprise leaders
happy.

How is your organization breaking down the walls between development and operations? Let us know.

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